Hey lovely person! 🌞

Hope you're having an exquisite day!

I reworked the overview section of my blog! Now each article has a nice thumbnail and a mini description. Should help to get a better understanding of what the articles are about.

This is an effect I worked on for the Maestro - we released a mini breakdown on social media! It's not particular tech-heavy, but what makes it fun in the game is that it fires when you hit a note. So, when you're pushing your hands down like a super-duper-conductor, the canons fire!

About the VFX: It's a Houdini pyro sim rendered from the side and front into flipbooks. Depending on how the canon is aligned to the player, I defined manually if the side or front flipbook is placed on a custom geometry. The geometry is like that to reduce as much overdraw as possible (see everything in motion by blicking the button below).

I love when companies have blogs and offer insights in their games. I stumbled across some blog posts about Street Fighter VFX and wanted to share them here.

This is a bit niche: On the official website from Cygames (Granblue Fantasy Relink) I could NOT find any blog. But when I searched on Google, I somehow found a "hidden" Tech Art Bog! It was started in 2015 but does not appear prominent on their website.

It's in Japanese, but you can translate it with your browser, and then you'll find topics like "open world procedural background creation tools and drawing features enable dynamic change".

By the way, you can go to Google and type this to search only the contents of this specific blog for e.g. "VFX":

site:https://tech.cygames.co.jp vfx

Edward Lu offers fantastic in-depth articles! The latest is about Tech Art of Wizard with a Gun - Mixing 2D/3D but I also love the one about the stylized water(falls) and how to tackle "simple" things like ground tiles.

Magari, a member of my Discord, is working on a lovely puzzle game in Godot and I want to offer the game my little newsletter platform. :)

This is sad news and touches me personally. I want to take the time and share a bit about my relationship with Tequila Works.

Even though I did VFX next to my position as 3D Artist in previous companies, Tequila Works was the first company which hired me as full time VFX artist.

At that time, I had just become a freelancer (trying out something new) and I was very lucky that at this moment the company contacted me because they were looking for a VFX person for the wonderful RiME. Someone in the company knew my blog and recommended me (thanks again for that!).

Of course, I was a bit nervous if I would be good enough. They gave me an art test, and luckily they liked my work. By the way, you can find my art test here.

Something very special: A producer asked me about my hardware, and I told him that I have a gaming laptop. He said "this will not be enough to handle RiME" because the Unreal project was huge and needed a lot of RAM. And what did they do? They sent me a whole computer from Madrid to Germany!! Of course, only as long as I worked for them, but still. I found this fascinating because usually freelancers are responsible to provide their hard- and software.

But that's not all. From time to time, they flew me to Madrid so that I could work with the team, since they knew that a personal connection is important. Even though I was "only" a freelancer and only in Madrid from time to time, they gave me a warm welcome and made me feel like I was really part of the team.

Lucky coincidence: At my first visit on the first day, someone in the team ordered pizza for dinner to celebrate something (not sure what it was). Because of that, we had a relaxed little gathering and that gave me the chance to chat with people about stuff besides work. I got on so well with some of them that we even did things in our free time, such as going to a club, organizing picnics or playing board games whenever I was in Madrid.

No, still not all! When I was asked to give a talk at the ADDON Conference, I was surprised because I never gave a talk before. The person who asked me, knew my blog and thought I might want to share some knowledge. Lucky me, I asked the company, and they allowed me to talk about RiME's VFX! That was my first talk, it was very well received, and I think it was the springboard for all the other talks I gave afterward — culminating in a talk at GDC!

And you know why I'm right now at Wild Sheep Studio? Because a nice man have seen my talk at this particular ADDON conference and asked me afterward, if I would be available to work for them! This was again a fortunate situation for me, because at the time Tequila Work didn't know exactly if they needed me, as it was unclear if/when future projects would be tackled. So I had to look for another client, and I'm very happy that the client found me instead.

So not only was it a time when I learned a lot about VFX and worked on cool projects, but it was also a time when I made friends and was very important for my future career.

Thank you, Tequila Works for everything! ❤️

Thanks for reading! Have a lovely day/night! 💘
Simon